.au domains dropping soon

Australian .com.au, .net.au, .org.au and .au domains due to be purged, from the .au registry's own public drop lists, with the earliest purge time, archive history and a spam check for each name.

How .au names drop

The .au registry publishes two drop lists every day: names that expired and were not renewed, and names deleted by their registrar or by auDA, the .au regulator. Each name has an eligible purge time; it is purged at the registry's next purge cycle on or after that time (early afternoon in Australia), and once purged anyone eligible can register it. A deleted name can still be restored by its registrar until it is purged, so some names leave the list without dropping.

Most .au names need an Australian connection, such as an ABN, ACN or Australian trademark, so check you are eligible before you try to register one. Times here are UK time. Just one ending: expired .com.au domains.

When a name drops it is released to the first registrar to ask for it. For a name others want, a backorder with a drop-catching service is the best chance; quieter names can often be registered at any registrar shortly after the drop. See auctions, backorders and drop-catching.

What the columns mean

• History: the year the Internet Archive first saw a website on the name, and how many years it was captured. This is website history, not registration age.
• Spam: our own 0 to 100 score from the archived URLs and history: gambling, adult, pharmacy, replica or loan pages, Chinese/Japanese keyword spam, mass-generated pages and long spells of redirects all raise it. Hover or tap the score for the reasons. It is an estimate, not Moz's Spam Score.
• Authority: the name's rank in Common Crawl's public web graph (lower is stronger), a free measure of how well linked it is across the web.
• Wiki: how many Wikipedia articles link to the name (English Wikipedia, plus the country's own edition for extensions such as .se, .it and .hu), from Wikipedia's own public data. Links from Wikipedia are a strong sign the old site was real and trusted. A dash means not checked yet.
• Old site topic: what the old website was about, worked out from the words in the addresses of its archived pages (such as /menu or /recipes), so you can find a name whose past matches your plans. Shown once the name's archive history has been checked.
• MM: the rank in the Majestic Million, Majestic's free daily list of the million sites with links from the most different networks (subnets). Any expiring name in it is rare and still well linked. Hover for its number of referring subnets; a dash means it is not in the list. Turn the column on in the Column manager.
• Old site: how many pages Common Crawl's recent crawls fetched on the name and the main language of their content. A name whose old pages are in a language that does not fit its extension often had spam on it. A dash means not checked yet; turn the column on in the Column manager.
• Words and topic: under each name, the dictionary words it splits into and its topic, so you can filter for keyword or brandable names. Pattern uses C for a consonant, V for a vowel and N for a number, so CVCV finds names like "bako".
• Other TLDs: how many of .com, .net, .org, .co.uk, .io, .de and .info are already registered with the same name. Names taken in many extensions are usually valued keywords.
• DA, TF, DR: Moz, Majestic and Ahrefs metrics, shown where we have measured them. A dash means not measured, never zero.

Before you buy

Look at the old captures, check the backlinks and search for trademarks before buying: our domain history checklist covers each step. Other lists: just dropped, caught domains, dropping in 24 hours, all expired domains, top picks, .uk drop list, .se drop list, .nu drop list, .hu drop list, .fr drop list, .it drop list.

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